Today I’d like to talk a little bit about Annette O’Toole, and why I think she’s a wonderful actress.
For Exhibit A, I’d like to point to a scene from Smallville. (For those of you unfamiliar with Smallville, it’s a TV series about the teenage years of Clark Kent before he decided to take up the mantle of Superman. Annette O’Toole plays Clark Kent’s mother Martha.) In the episode “Transference”, Lionel Luthor (Lex’s dad) and Clark Kent have accidentally swapped bodies due to a rare Kryptonian artifact Lionel has procured while in prison. This means that Clark, who everyone thinks is Lionel, is now trapped in prison, and Lionel, who everyone thinks is Clark, is out in the world with superpowers. This, to put it mildly, does not go well.
Clark tries to reason with Lionel, or to trick him into swapping bodies again, but Lionel is in no hurry to change his situation. So what Clark does next is what any teenager in jail would think to do; he calls his mom. This situation is complicated slightly by the fact that Martha, like everyone else, thinks Clark is Lionel, and Lionel, in the course of this show, has been…interested, shall we say, in Martha Kent, and definitely not in a way Martha appreciates.
As the scene begins, Martha enters the visiting room at the prison, ready for Lionel to try to manipulate her and to fight back against that manipulation. Clark-inside-Lionel is sitting behind the table, slumped forward like a kid who is way out of his depth. Martha sits and tells Clark that the only reason she’s there is because he told her her son was in danger. Clark agrees, then immediately leads with a variation on the “you’re not going to believe me” line. Watch Annette O’Toole here. She’s preparing to disregard this statement, possibly already getting ready to walk out. She’s expecting a con. And when Clark tells her who he is, she follows through with her initial instincts; she tells him he’s a sick man and gets up to leave.
This next moment makes the scene, and although there’s dialogue happening, at least half the scene is occurring on Annette O’Toole’s face. Clark haltingly begs his mother not to leave, and begins to tell her about one of his memories of when he was young and playing tag…the first time he used his super-speed, although he couches it in vague language, knowing his mother will understand. As Clark begins telling the story, Martha rolls her eyes, ready for some generic tale that Lionel Luthor has made up, or something anyone might know about her son…but that isn’t what she hears. And as more and more details of the story come out, Martha begins to realize that there is only one person who could know this, who could be telling this story. She doesn’t have a single word of dialogue until Clark finishes the story, but the dawning realization that this man is her son plays across her face wordlessly until she knows without a doubt that it is Clark, not Lionel, speaking to her. It’s a beautiful piece of acting that makes the scene; we already know Clark is the one talking to her, but she makes the way that Martha is convinced of this subtle and real and true.
The other Annette O’Toole role I’d like to talk about is her role in Dreamer of Oz, a TV movie about L. Frank Baum, writer of the Wizard of Oz books, and his family. It was written by Richard Matheson, and stars O’Toole as Maud Gage Baum as well as John Ritter (sorely missed) as L. Frank Baum and Rue McClanahan (also sorely missed) as Matilda Gage, Maud Gage’s mother.
Dreamer of Oz begins with the 1939 premiere of the film version of The Wizard of Oz (and, in a nod to that film, begins in black and white). As stars arrive and parade up and down the red carpet, an elderly lady arrives. No one seems to know who she is, save one newspaperman (played by John Cameron Mitchell of Hedwig and the Angry Inch fame) who follows her, identifies her as the wife of the now-deceased Frank Baum, and asks for her story. Maud then narrates the story of her first meeting, romance, and life with Frank; the film changes to color as we go back in time to relive their courtship.
Dreamer of Oz is a movie with a lot of great moments, but one of the key moments early on is between Maud, who is a college student at Cornell, and Frank, who is working as an actor (and, the movie suggests, is not very good at it). Maud informs Frank that she’s been told she has no imagination, but Frank doesn’t believe that. As they sit together on a porch swing, Frank asks Maud to close her eyes, and to tell him what she sees. At first, Maud laughs off the suggestion, but then Frank begins to describe an imaginary land in great detail, whispering intimately into her ear. The movie shows us the porch swing flying over the land Frank describes, and we see Maud become more and more involved in her imaginings until she opens her eyes with a gasp and says that for a moment she actually saw the world Frank described. Frank responds, smiling, that he knew she would.
The scene is a delicate one, and played beautifully by both actors. It’s a bit unusual, too, in that we, the home viewers, can see what Frank is describing–can, in effect, see inside Frank’s imagination–while Maud has her eyes closed and literally cannot see what’s around her. Until the end of the scene, that is, where she gasps and opens her eyes, which causes the scene around them to change back to the Gages’ front porch. Again, O’Toole sells this moment with very few words but a wealth of feeling; you believe that she has not had much call for the use of her imagination, and you can see in her reaction how important and how breathtaking it is when she suddenly discovers that she has an imagination, and that this man can excite it. She believes in the power of Frank’s words and imaginings before anyone else does, and that’s a crucial element of their relationship, because you have to believe that she loves him so much she would leave a potentially promising future for this man, who holds no such guarantee.
With O’Toole in the role, you believe it.
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